“Oh!  Child, indeed!  Was I a child the other day, my good fellow, when I saved your squadron from being cut to pieces like grass with a scythe?  As for nobility?  Pouf!  Not much of that in me.  I love France—­yes.  A soldier always loves his country.  She is so brave, too, and so fair, and so gay.  Not like your Albion—­if it is yours—­who is a great gobemouche stuffed full of cotton, steaming with fog, clutching gold with one hand and the Bible with the other, that she may swell her money-bags, and seem a saint all the same; never laughing, never learning, always growling, always shuffling, who is like this spider—­look!—­a tiny body and huge, hairy legs—­pull her legs, the Colonies, off, and leave her little English body, all shriveled and shrunk alone, and I should like to know what size she would be then, and how she would manage to swell and to strut?”

Wherewith Cigarette tossed the spider into the air, with all the supreme disdain she could impel into that gesture.  Cigarette, though she knew not her A B C, and could not have written her name to save her own life, had a certain bright intelligence of her own that caught up political tidings, and grasped at public subjects with a skill education alone will not bestow.  One way and another she had heard most of the floating opinions of the day, and stored them up in her fertile brain as a bee stores honey into his hive by much as nature-given and unconscious an instinct as the bee’s own.

Cecil listened, amused.

“You little Anglophobist!  You have the tongue of a Voltaire!”

“Voltaire?” questioned Cigarette.  “Voltaire!  Let me see.  I know that name.  He was the man who championed Calas?  Who had a fowl in the pot for every poor wretch that passed his house?  Who was taken to the Pantheon by the people in the Revolution?”

“Yes.  And the man whom the wise world pretends still to call without a heart or a God!”

“Chut!  He fed the poor, and freed the wronged.  Better than pattering Paters, that!” said Cigarette, who thought a midnight mass at Notre Dame or a Salutation at the Madeleine a pretty coup de theatre enough, but who had for all churches and creeds a serene contempt and a fierce disdain.  “Go to the grandams and the children!” she would say, with a shrug of her shoulders, to a priest, whenever one in Algiers or Paris attempted to reclaim her; and a son of the Order of Jesus, famed for persuasiveness and eloquence, had been fairly beaten once when, in the ardor of an African missionary, he had sought to argue with the little Bohemian of the Tricolor, and had had his logic rent in twain, and his rhetoric scattered like dust, under the merciless home-thrusts and the sarcastic artillery of Cigarette’s replies and inquiries.

“Hola!” she cried, leaving Voltaire for what took her fancy.  “We talk of Albion—­there is one of her sons.  I detest your country, but I must confess she breeds uncommonly handsome men.”